Dominican Republic starts mass deportations of Haitians and expels nearly 11,000 in a week

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) - The Dominican Republic said Tuesday it has deported or repatriated nearly 11,000 Haitians in the past week alone, fulfilling a pledge that it will do so weekly as neighboring Haiti scrambles to handle the influx, besieged by poverty and gang violence.

The Dominican government announced last week that it would deport up to 10,000 Haitians a week, citing an "excess" of immigrants as relations between the two countries that share the island of Hispaniola continue to sour.

The announcement prompted Haitian officials to request an emergency meeting at the Organization of American States, scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.

"The forced and mass deportation of our Haitian compatriots from the Dominican Republic is a violation of the fundamental principles of human dignity," Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille wrote on social media platform X on Tuesday morning.

Activists say the deportations are putting the lives of thousands at risk as Haiti struggles to contain rampant gang violence and emerge from deepening poverty.

A U.N.-backed mission led by Kenyan police that began earlier this year is facing a lack of funds and personnel as it tries to quell gang violence.

Dominique Dupuy, Haiti's foreign affairs minister, condemned what she called "dehumanizing acts."

"The brutal scenes of roundups and deportations that we are witnessing are an affront to human dignity," she wrote Monday on X.

The mass deportations also have led to an increase in abandoned children across the Dominican Republic, warned activist William Charpentier, coordinator for the Dominican-based National Coalition for Migrations and Refugees.

"They take their parents, or one of the parents, and leave the children behind, even while they're in school," he said.

Charpentier called the mass deportations "a type of persecution against Black people, against everything they presume to be Haitian."

He said even people with legal documents are being detained and deported, a practice that activists say has occurred in previous years as well.

Complaints about extortions also have surged.

Ocicle Batista, a 45-year-old Haitian migrant who sells avocados in the capital, Santo Domingo, accused soldiers of demanding anywhere from $230 to $330 to avoid deportations "even when they have their papers in hand," she said of the migrants.

"We come here to work," she said.

Luis Rafael Lee Ballester, the Dominican Republic's migration director, said human rights are being respected and that a proportional use of force is used when migrants are arrested.

He said those with documents were detained because they did not have "reliable identification" to justify their presence in the country.

From Oct. 1-7, 7,591 people were deported and 3,323 repatriated, according to the government, which said they were all Haitian.

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Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.